DeSantis Pledges Immediate Action Against Biden's Vaccine Mandate: 'The Rule's Going Down'
The Biden administration’s new rule forcing companies with at least 100 workers to impose a vaccine or testing mandate on their workers is “going down,” Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday.
DeSantis said Florida will fight the rule in court “immediately,” according to WTVJ-TV.
“Florida will be responding, and I think the rule’s going down. I just don’t think that there’s an adequate basis for it, and I think you’ve even seen people on their side acknowledge that they don’t have firm constitutional footing for this,” DeSantis said.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule gives companies with 100 or more employees until Jan. 4 to have the employees vaccinated or comply with a regimen of weekly coronavirus tests and eternal mask-wearing at work.
Companies can be fined nearly $14,000 for violations.
DeSantis said the so-called emergency rule is simply a power grab.
“They’re saying this is an imminent danger, it’s gotta be an emergency rule, these people have been working this whole time, they’ve been working for a year and a half. They announced that they were gonna do this in September; it took them six weeks to write the rule, and it doesn’t go into effect until January?” DeSantis said, according to WTVJ.
“They’re abusing emergency power to be able to do what they would not be able to get through the Congress and do in a constitutional way.”
DeSantis said Biden’s edict will send ripples throughout the economy and society.
“People should not be in a situation where they’re faced with the jab or their jobs. People have been working; we don’t want to kick people out of jobs,” the governor said.
“At what point does the federal government have the limit to their power if they can just go ahead and impose this on the entire private economy through an executive fiat? That’s not the way our constitutional system is set up.”
DeSantis isn’t the only Republican governor condemning the rule and threatening legal action.
“Not surprisingly, President Biden is plowing forward with his OSHA rule to punish America’s businesses – yet another unprecedented federal overreach into the private sector,” Idaho Gov. Brad Little said in a statement on his website.
“I have been actively working with Attorney General Lawrence Wasden and my legal team, and we will join a multistate lawsuit Friday to stop this latest attempt to force the private sector to police President Biden’s vaccine mandates.”
Indiana also is fighting back, state Attorney General Todd Rokita said, according to WXIN-TV.
“This is a direct attack on states’ rights. This is a direct attack on individual liberty and freedom. And it’s a complete overreach of the federal government,” Rokita said Thursday.
“It’s egregious and insidious that we use something in a law that was meant to protect workers at the workplace — from dangerous toxicities and from other directly unsafe situations — to use it in this fashion to cover something that is a much bigger part of our lives.”
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, a Republican, wasted few words on the rule, according to U.S. News and World Report.
“This rule is garbage,” he said through a spokesman. “It’s unconstitutional, and we will fight it.”
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